Like so many avid readers in the last year or so I devoured Helen Garner’s diaries. I was intrigued to find out what the great Australian author wrote in her own private papers. Surely no-one can write inspirational copy in their journalling every day without fail?
The first edition, the Yellow Notebook, hooked me in. I have read it multiple times already, it seemed familiar from the beginning, I started to feel as if I knew Garner intimately. I’ve underlined sentences, copied out quotes into my collection, exclaimed with each flash of recognition over observations of people and places and ideas so familiar to me. That she is local and writes of a world I know makes her diaries even more interesting. How to end a story left me cringing, sad, yet in awe of the courage she shows by admitting to herself, and now letting others see, that she, too, is as fallible, capable of the same swinging emotions and damaged relationships as every human.
I am under no illusions that her journals are edited for brevity and to maintain a certain amount of dignity (though not a lot of privacy) and yet I saw that Garner could lose herself in flights of fancy, admit to bad moods, repeat herself, question things. I loved that she wrote notes for herself and that she used her scribblings to direct both her inner thinking and her outward creativity.
This! This is what journalling is to me, too.
Such validation was important and gave me confidence to keep going. Seeing how HG (that’s what I call her privately) writes when she is her own audience, I went on a search to read the journals of other writers.
Oliver Sacks’ writings engrossed me, the workings of his mind so fascinating, average and accessible and still enormously complex. I love to see examples of his handwriting, pencil on yellow legal paper, thoughts and ideas and entire articles written long hand as the ideas came to him. Sacks had an assistant who bore the dubious responsibility of translating his handwritten work into a digital form, he always wrote to be published.
Virginia Woolf frustrated me with her complaints and urgent need for approval. Reading her journals was a hard slog. Surrounded by a privileged elite and wanting for nothing she suffered from terrible self-doubt and used her journal as a receptacle for dissatisfaction and angst. I persisted with her purely for the mentions of her social life, the visitors she received all famous in their own rights. Was she writing for herself or did she have an inkling her words would one day be shared with the world?
Anne Frank, imprisoned in the attic during that horrific war that ultimately took her life, didn’t know her words would be published and known across the world. Clearly she hoped for it to happen one day, that she would be a writer in the future she dreamed of but that wasn’t to be hers. Her imagined reader, Kitty, gives her an intimate friend to confide in and releases the inhibitions that would otherwise have stilled her pen.
Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat. Pray. Love. fame) talks about the importance of morning pages in her own creative life. A dear friend and I went to see LG when she spoke in Melbourne in February 2020. Yes, that 2020. The year that was. She spoke of the value of The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron) in her own creative life and on the train on the way back to Bendigo we made a pact to do the program together. Serendipitously, we began on Monday March 9. Our first Morning Pages were written as the world began to shut down around us.
Well, LG and The Artist’s Way proved to be a breakthrough that can be summarised in these two statements.
Done is better than good.
Process, not product.
I have stopped worrying about trying to get it perfect. Make a spelling mistake (… OK, I couldn’t bring myself to do that). Cross out words. Change your mind. Swear! Admit to flights of fancy and regrets and to pride and jealousy. Just write it down. And own it.
The only person who will read my Pages is me. I’m not writing something to be published or marked by a teacher or read by a friend. I am writing because I love doing it. Sometimes I write ‘blah blah blah’. Frequently I bore myself. And every now and then I sit back and wonder at what has appeared on the page in my handwriting. The joy of just writing for writing’s sake is almost indescribable!
Journals are like a workout for the soul, written for an audience of one. Diarists are terrified by the possibility of those private scribbles being read, a fear that stayed my pen for years.
I’ve heard of codicils in wills directing that personal papers and diaries be burned upon the passing of the writer. If these were always followed the world would be poorer without the insights and experiences of some great thinkers. Thinkers who lived ordinary enough lives, loved, laughed and made mistakes. HG burned a collection of her journals when she was in her early twenties. I was horrified at the thought of how much was lost in that fire. But I get it. No fires here though. Not yet.
Who knew that the book, at that exact moment, would give two people so much and yet such different things. It was yin and yang. The morning pages for you and the artists dates for me. A game changer on both accounts. It was like discovering our healthy-heroin right when we needed it. I watched your morning pages ooze out of you with easy addiction and I realised how important regular artists dates were to my soul. It’s not that we didn’t know, it’s that we didn’t know how much we needed to feed these needs everyday in a way that was critical to our being. I’m so thankful for the discovery. I’m so thankful for the shared learning and experience of that time.
How lucky we were!